Totem and Taboo describe the ultimate meanings of Being and Waking-Being, Destiny and Causality, Race and Language, Time and Space, yearning and fear, pulse and tension, politics and religion. The Totem side of life is plant-like and inheres in all being, while the Taboo side is animal and presupposes the free movement of a being in a world. Our Totem organs are those of the blood-circulation and of reproduction, our Taboo organs those of the senses and the nerves. All that is of Totem has physiognomy, all that is of Taboo has system. In the Totemistic resides the common feeling of beings that belong to the same stream of existence. It cannot be acquired and cannot be got rid of; it is a fact, the fact of all facts. That which is of Taboo, on the other hand, is the characteristic of linkages of waking-consciousness, it is learnable and acquirable, and on that very account guarded as a secret by cult-communities, philosophers' schools, and artists' guilds — each of which possesses a sort of cryptic language of its own.[1]
But Being can be thought of without waking-consciousness, whereas the reverse is not the case — i.e., there are race-beings without language, but no languages without race. All that is of race, therefore, possesses its proper expression, independent of any kind of waking-consciousness and common to plant and animal. This expression — not to be confounded with the expression-language which consists in an active alteration of the expression — is not meant for witnesses, but is simply there; it is physiognomy. Not that it stops at the plant; in every living language, too (and how significant the word "living"!) we can detect, besides the Taboo side that is learnable, an entirely untransferable quality of race that the old vessels of the language cannot pass on to alien successors; it lies in melody, rhythm, stress; in colour, ring, and tempo of the expression; in idiom, in accompanying gesture. On this account it is necessary to distinguish between language and speaking, the first being in itself a dead stock of signs, and the second the activity that operates with the signs.[2] When we cease to be able to hear and see directly how a language is spoken, thenceforward it is only its ossature and not its flesh that we can know. This is so with Sumerian, Gothic, Sanskrit, and all other languages that we have merely deciphered from texts and inscriptions, and we are right in calling these languages dead, for the human communities that were formed by them have vanished. We know the Egyptian tongue, but not the tongues of the Egyptians. Of Augustan Latin we know approximately the sound- values of the letters and the meaning of the words, but we do not know how the oration
- ↑ Obviously, Totemistic facts, so far as they come under the observation of the waking-consciousness, obtain a significance of the Taboo kind also; much in man's sexual life, for example, is performed with a profound sense of fear, because his will-to-understand is baffled by it.
- ↑ W. von Humboldt (Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues) was the first to emphasize the fact that a language is not a thing, but an activity. "If we would be quite precise, we can certainly say there is no such thing as 'language,' just as there is no such thing as 'intellect'; but man does speak, and does act intellectually."
